Zhongli Incident - Incident

Incident

In 1977, the loose group of opposition candidates won 34% of the vote in the elections for the Taiwan Provincial Assembly. The growing opposition began to have an effect inside the Kuomintang. One popular figure, Hsu Hsin-liang, left the party and ran as a Tangwai for a local county magistrate's position in November 1977. Hsu Hsin-liang was an unpredictable political figure, self labelled as a "socialist", who wanted to maintain the Taiwanese economic base while humanising its class structure. He vigorously advocated parliamentary democracy and Taiwan independence, and frequently attacked the state's political corruption and systematic violation of human rights. Hsu commonly spoke Hakka at public rallies, in defiance of the Kuomintang's insistence on Mandarin Chinese.

Afraid that the Kuomintang would rig the election, 10,000 of Hsu's supporters gathered in the town of Zhongli to object to the use of paper ballots. Believing there was election fraud, the protestors rioted, burning down the Zhongli police station. The Kuomintang called in soldiers (some 90% of whom were Taiwanese youths) to suppress the riot. The protestors chanted that they were "beating their fellow Taiwanese."

The riot became known as the "Zhongli incident". It was the first significant political protest on the streets since the 1940s.

After the event, the regime's policy of riot control was to use police and military police for such purposes. The incident galvanised dissidents with a surge of hope.